Tomorrow I am going to the hip hop workshop with my demo. I have lost a little enthusiasm of late. Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. Like mounting your gmail account as a filesystem. Anyway, I started off with a lot of enthusiasm for it, got half way through and now have lost a lot of desire to go on. That’s basically the way things go. The desire to perform activity is called kama in Sanskrit, and the activity itself is called karma. By performing a particular activity, new desires are acquired, and hence the repetitive cycle of desire and activity, known as samsara continues.

My MCing career started back in 2000 when I was part of the now legendary (or is that mythical?) rapping duo “AC/BC”, MC Anaconda and DJ Boa Constrictor, with my good buddy electronic music producer Vrajadhama das. We put the whole thing on hold while we went to live in South America for three years as “Los Gringos Andinos”, playing Huaynos and Valses from Ecuador to Bolivia.

Now that I am back in the West I have picked up the mic again, if only to get the residual desires out of me. Now I have exhausted myself. But I know that if I stop now, the urge will return in another three or four years, and once again I will take the stage to battle it out with suckah MCs. Srila Prabhupada calls this bhoga-tyaga or alternating engagement and renunciation. First you get into doing some karma, then you get sick of it and figure that it isn’t really your thing (that’s called jñana in Sanskrit, and you need a Spanish keyboard to type it) and then you give it up. That’s also called renunciation. And then you do the sad comeback tour where you headline in Japan and nobody else even remembers who you are.

You can read a nice short work on this subject here.

So in order to break out of that cycle you need to push on through and not give up. But why would you want to do that? Well, if you do something as an offering to Krishna then you become purified of the desire to do it. And if you keep going when you have become purified of the desire, then the only motivation that remains is to keep doing it for Krishna. That’s called bhakti, or devotional service.

So I started the whole thing with the idea to do a small demo and maybe one or two shows, and now I have run out of desire, so I will just keep going out of duty. If I had not started with the idea of serving Krishna with my rapping in mind, then I would just give up right now out of disinterest, and then I wouldn’t experience any purification, and I would stay stuck in the cycle.

From a purely material perspective, it’s the guy who sticks it out who wins. There’s one famous story of an America 400m runner who got a silver medal in one Olympics and then went straight back into training for another three years. At the next Olympic games he won the gold. Afterwards he said: “I wasn’t the best in school athletics. There were many better athletes than me. The difference is that they gave up. They got married, had a career, a family. I’ve stayed working a humble job in a hardware store and keep going. That’s why I am here today and they aren’t”.

Srila Prabhupada would always say: “Don’t try to be a great devotee, just be a good devotee”.

Anyway, I am going to soldier on. Who knows, the big breakthrough may come: the million dollar record deal, the bling bling jewellery, the cars, the guns, the drugs, the hedonistic downward spiral into the Betty Ford Clinic. Or I might just get purified of whatever samskara (subconscious impression of a past activity) that causes me to have these sudden bursts of rapping enthusiasm.

Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

“Yo, this is MC K-OS, the unstoppable rhyme attacker - the world’s only Open Source TCP rapper!” Out.